This invention relates to an electrical interface board for use in facilitating interconnection between electrical elements and circuits.
Electrical interface boards are in wide use as, for example, to facilitate the control of the multiplicity of individual electrical circuits found in the typical modern day motor vehicle. The electrical interface board in a motor vehicle may, for example, be mounted under the hood of the vehicle and may comprise a box structure including a plurality of circuit outlets on a first face of the structure for plug in receipt of electrical control elements such as fuses and relays, a plurality of power outlets on a second opposite face of the box structure for plug in receipt of electrical power input and output elements in the form, for example, of wiring harnesses, and a series of electrical paths extending between the power outlets and the circuit control outlets and each including first conductors extending generally parallel to the first and second faces of the box structure and second conductors extending generally perpendicular to the first and second faces for connection at their respective upper and lower ends with electrical control elements and the wiring harness.
While this arrangement provides an efficient means of distributing power within the box structure and selectively interconnecting the electrical circuit control elements with the wiring harness, this particular form of interface board is expensive to produce since each of the electrical paths extending between the power outlets and the circuit control outlets, and in particular the horizontal conductors of the circuit paths, are dedicated to a particular circuit path and a particular interface board and must be modified to accommodate different interface boards in different vehicles or to accommodate variations in the interface board in a given vehicle resulting from variations in the optional equipment on the vehicle. Since these horizontal conductors are typically formed utilizing hard tooling, and since this hard tooling is relatively expensive, each change or modification to the interface board to accommodate a different electrical path, as required by different vehicles or different optional equipment on the same vehicle, is very costly with the result that the overall cost of the interface board is relatively high. Further, the horizontal conductor elements and the vertical conductor elements of a given circuit path are typically joined together utilizing separable male/female interface connection which are costly to produce and which tend to provide a relatively high resistance to current flow in derogation of the overall electrical efficiency of the interface board.